In making their third record, Hex Key, Mamalarky spent entire seasons hunched over guitars and obscure synthesizers, their long hair sweeping over strings or covering concentrated eyes. The band recorded takes in between the sounds of passing ice cream trucks and yowling stray cats in their LA home studio, a tight but prolific living room. Hex Key is a document of perseverance, of going for the gold while somehow remaining totally aware of one’s own vulnerabilities. These effervescent, swirling songs chronicle vivid desires crashing against real-life limitations but finding a way to keep burning anyway. That tension between anguish and resilience, between performed aloofness and brutal honesty, drives the music, imbues it with a compelling intensity.
Over the last 8 years, the quartet’s members have lived in Austin, Atlanta, and Los Angeles, and have established a bond that they acknowledge is rare. “We have an unmatched level of trust in each other,” drummer Dylan Hill says. “There is no air of professionalism. It's literally just four friends hanging out and getting to the bottom of something.”
Given their closeness, Mamalarky are able to fight like family, not necessarily with each other, but for the music, to make it the best it can be. Whereas their last album, Pocket Fantasy, was exploratory and free-flowing, the songs on Hex Key are the result of absolute devotion and fine tuning. It’s the kind of attention to detail that can only happen when the four bandmates are working alone together, uninterrupted by producers, engineers, or any outside influences. “It’s never ‘kick your feet up, let’s see what happens,” guitarist and singer Livvy Bennett says. “We’re always staring each other deeply in the eyes saying ‘Let’s make this next take incredible.’ We never settle.” The band is so committed to their craft that Hill even recorded the drums for “#1 Best of All Time” amidst an intense bout of poison ivy. The determination he felt in the moment manifested itself in the song’s frantic-but-focused percussion, he says.
That sustained effort is evident throughout Hex Key, an intricate, endlessly-curious album full of sonic left turns and playful genre implosions: Bennett’s ethereal vocals pierce through blaring synth notes and stylophone that sounds like a warbling frog ribbit on “The Quiet.” “Anhedonia’s” ‘90’s grunge guitar is refracted through a shimmery delay that layers a dream-pop haze onto the song. And on “Nothing Lasts Forever,” a slinky groove establishes a mood of simultaneous ease and propulsiveness. Such dramatic synthesis could become chaotic in less capable hands, but Mamalarky expertly pastiche sounds, time signatures, and moods together to create delightful, singular songs exploding with feeling.
Mamalarky are intentional about ensuring the sonic diversity of their projects. “The worst thing you can say about a Mamalarky song is ‘This sounds like another song of yours,’” bassist Noor Khan says. It’s what distinguishes them from a lot of indie rock bands who prioritize sonic consistency throughout an album. On Hex Key, each song is a world of its own.
A feeling of determination permeates throughout the record. The first song Mamalarky wrote for the album was “Feels So Wrong.” Throughout the track, they oscillate between lamenting deep-seeded feelings of inauthenticity while also reassuring themselves that everything will work out. While writing the album, Bennett had just quit her job, moved to Los Angeles from Atlanta, and was delivering pizza via Uber Eats. Around this time, Bennett and keyboardist Michael Hunter also started producing for other artists out of their home studio. The experience led to further genre bending in their own work and pushed them to make more music than they ever had before. “I was writing some of my favorite music ever, but it didn’t feel how I expected it to,” she says. “I still didn’t have it all figured out. So I wrote songs like ‘Feels So Wrong,’ and ‘#1 Best of All Time’ as a way of telling myself what I needed to hear.”
As much as the music is meant to be reassuring, it also honors confusion rather than quelling it. Hex Key often acknowledges the inherent discomforts to being alive - self-doubt, romantic yearning, feeling out of place in your own skin - and embodies the anger this dysphoria ignites. “A lot of this record is about reconciling with rage, finding a way to create something useful with it,” Bennett says. “You can’t really talk yourself out of a feeling, but there’s always a good place to put them.”
While working and reworking the songs on Hex Key, the bandmates would often go on an intense hike near Bennett’s home. “We would be getting our heart rate up while we figured out the details of the record,” Bennett says. “I would be like, ‘I think we need to re-record the guitar. And the chorus needs to have some sort of lift happening.’ And then, once we would get up to the top of the mountain, we would see this really beautiful pond. It was somehow always reassuring.” The songs on Hex Key are a document of that uphill scramble. Throughout the record, Mamalarky confront their messiest emotions, turning them into high octane musical compositions that twist furiously and blaze fluorescent. Whether or not they reach the top is almost irrelevant when the process of getting there is so beautiful to observe.
-Vrinda Jagota
